NEB Prizes 2021: All Applications

W-hole is an innovative system designed to support urban waterworks by creating multiple urban basins, widely diffused around the city and helpful in emergency situations. In normal conditions this system harvests, purifies and distributes rainwater, connecting public areas to domestic ones and thus allowing to reduce the clean water consumption as well as changing citizen’s behaviours. The latter objective is also possible thanks to an online platform where different informations are available.

The Local Activity Center is a project that aims to create a space that would be the focal point for the life of the local residents and enable them to integrate. The architecture creates space rather than being the visible cubature itself.

The structure of the building is based on a rectangular plan with a twisted roof surface. The seats, which are integrated with the roof, can be used both during outdoor events and in everyday use as resting places.

Sample Bar is a Swedish innovation that aims to safeguard music cultural heritage on the brink of extinction. New and old generations can learn, play, create and remix together by moving and twisting tactile wooden blocks on a glass surface. With optical tracking the blocks become sensitive controllers that allow endless musical possibilities. Music almost lost in history is brought back for new generations to be inspired.

The project is part of a wider masterplan in Porto di Mare and it aims to restore a sense of belonging to the context by constructing a sharing community inside a tower. This project displays great attention both to social inclusion and to environmental sustainability. Specifically, it is designed following the paradigms of the circular economy, benefitting from the reuse of local materials and dry-construction techniques that encompass the possibility of future modifications. 

‘Houses beyond-the-threshold’ is a project that has seen the transformation of condemned public housing in a peripheral district of Milan into living spaces for the transitory inhabiting of unaccompanied foreign minors, guided in a self-recovery path of the flats they would have lived until becoming of age. Not just a response to the need for a shelter, but an unprecedent model of welcoming based on reciprocity that keeps together the renewal of architectural space with site-specific artworks

Abram Gurewicz's guesthouse (1906-1921) is a unique example of wooden architecture in the Świdermajer style. The aim of the work was to adapt and expand the facility for the needs of a high-class medical center with extensive diagnostics, a bed ward and an operating block, as well as a hotel and recreation area with catering facilities. Above all, the aim is to restore the facility to its former glory.

A border, a space, an area, a park. A green lung in the city of Nicosia against scorching Cyprus summers, and a pace of historical and cultural reappropriation for the whole island. A new space for people to mix, gather and integrate, in a diverse context and in a secure area. A biosphere for animal and human interaction in the core of the consolidated city of Nicosia, a walk between architectural and historical heritage aiming at reconnection and inclusivity for Cypriots, tourists and curious. 

To reveal the diversity and hybridisation hidden behind the everyday, we have set out to listen to the plant species of our cities.

Kleos is an initiative to explore urban vegetation relating botanical species with scientific, artistic and sound fragments which are activated and combined according to the proximity of the users to the plants. 

The proposal involves citizens in mapping new specimens to complete an atlas that explores the dimension of the city as a garden of coexistence.

RATAPLAN’s phased revitalisation concept of “Arena Wien” from 1994 was based on the spirit of the place’s socio-political history and inheritance of the 1970s: The former abattoir was successfully squatted by the “Arenauten” and became a place for cultural and artistical activities. Part of the architectural concept was to hand over the building in a “semi-complete” condition, so that final tasks could be carried out by the “Arenauten’s” successors. The last phase was completed in March 2018.

We are carving a collective social and living sculpture. Local people, living beings, and temporary agents will build and take care of a garden in Gibellina - inland of North-west Sicily. Channelling energies from light and water, we will live together this common landscape trying to heal what is fragmented and socially distant. The exercise of our collective agency is to imprint, assemble, shape and play around a new aesthetic of a shared memory.